Jumps in Logic: A Rare Glimpse Into the Mind of the Shepherd

Not all doctors are incompetent...

Maybe it’s not fair to label this as being “conspiracy minded”, but the subject in question is a member of that camp’s philosophy. I also should point out now that since my viewpoints so far has the seemed to be in complete opposition to Alex Jones that I am not in any way saying that these things are not occurring, as I do understand that I have no knowledge of what my neighbors are doing behind closed doors, let alone what happens in top-secret on the national stage. I guess that part of my problem with this is the conspiracy camp’s extremely condescending label of “sheep” for those people who are apparently “asleep” or “kowtowing to authority” or “locked into the system ”. Perhaps I just get a little bit of joy from picking apart their logical fallacies, as you shall see in this mind-boggling conundrum of logic that isn’t exactly what you could label as “conspiracy”, but it is certainly plucked from the same point of view as those expressed daily at Prison Planet.

With regards to what I’m going to say about wheat, I’m not contesting that. In fact, from the little bit that I’ve heard and all the hullabaloo surrounding gluten, I’m actually giving this the benefit of the doubt and it is not what this blog post is concerned with.

A friend of mine recently visited his doctor for a routine checkup and I believe was discussing his recent weight loss and had mentioned how reducing/eliminating wheat from his diet was credited as being the cause. He then told me how he expected his doctor to disagree with him and was surprised that the doctor agreed.

Did you spot the problem with that? While those two sentences make perfect sense grammatically and probably wouldn’t even raise an eyebrow if scanned over quickly, that is a confounding flip-flop in logic.

Let’s decode:

A layman is expressing hereto unknown medical knowledge to a medical professional with the expectation that said medical professional is either too stupid to understand it or is too indoctrinated into “the system” to comprehend it without dismissing or ridiculing it. This is only the first layer.

The second layer applies to the expectations of the layman, who said “I was surprised that he agreed with me.” Why should anyone be surprised that someone who has a minimum of 8 years of rigorous study just to get a PhD have the knowledge that a layman can get from a Google search? Admittedly, a layman does have a certain open-mindedness when peering into fields in which he has little to no knowledge, but that sort of open-mindedness is of the brand that gets you duped and conned. Any professional or semi professional poker player can attest to this, as they bear witness daily to what happens when outsiders stumble into their domain.

The part that is unclear is whether or not my friend was impressed with himself or the doctor, in which case neither scenario makes much sense. If he had to convince the doctor that his relative inexperience somehow trumped the doctor’s pseudo-scientific worldview, then by default, doctors aren’t nearly as stupid as they are believed to be by conspiracy enthusiasts. On the other hand, if he was happy that the doctor somehow validated his Internet knowledge, then by default, doctors actually aren’t so stupid or hopelessly entrenched in the system after all and you should vaccinate your children without fear of autism.

Letter to a Friend: The Sad State of Limit Hold'Em Circa 2013

Hieronymus Bosch's eerily prophetic "9 Levels of the Limit Hold'Em Abyss" (1539) 

A few days ago, a friend of mine asked me my opinion about whether or not it was a good idea to start adding some Limit Hold’em into his table load. He said that he was assuming it wasn’t much different from short stack poker and he figured that he could also get a 2bb/100 winrate.

He’s a sharp guy, so I have no idea how he came to these conclusions, but since I felt that it deserved a lengthy answer, I figured it would be best to share what I have to say, since apparently the answer wasn’t as obvious as I had previously thought.

A little background information:

Looking back on the game of Limit Hold’Em brings back some fond memories as well as some cringe worthy moments. It was where I first started my “career” (if you could even call it that back then). Like many people starting out, I thought that being a professional poker player was “cool” and that I would ride up the limits like a white Phil Ivey and be autographing my own version of Play Poker Like the Pros at Borders. Obviously, Phil Ivey is black, Phil Hellmuth’s ghost writer doesn’t know shit about poker, and Borders, much like limit hold ‘em, only exists in most people’s memories.

So, back to the question.  A few years back, I had a stellar rakeback deal on the Cake Network and since there wasn’t a whole lot on offer at the NLH stakes that I preferred playing, I figured I would take a shot at those “soft” limit tables and rock it out for that juicy 2bb/100 winrate. It took me about 2 days to wake up to the fact that I didn’t know what the fuck was going on. It seemed like every raise was getting 3-bet by both reg and fish and that as much as I tried to fight back, I still ended up getting my ass kicked at showdown. On the offensive end, I couldn’t push a guy off bottom pair, which might sound like a good thing to people accustomed to getting value in a game like NLH, but when coupled with the first statement, I was getting the worst of both worlds.

As most long term players can tell you, the fish will tend to mimic the regs both in open raise size and 3-bet tendencies. This doesn’t tend to be a good thing. Why not? As the game matured, the aggression employed by regulars has been ratcheted up in all games. The end result was that getting a cheap shot to hit our draws and then getting rewarded handsomely for doing so (how all of us “pros” made our money) no longer was a viable source of profit. All of a sudden, our attempts to isolate were thwarted and we found ourselves being the victims of said isolation plays.

In our efforts to beat fish, we still need to have the ability to play flops with them where they can be complicit to our will and bend over and take it as we command them to. In NLH, we still have the ability to punish such unruly behavior (albeit much less so in 2013 than in 2004), but unfortunately, in LHE this is no longer the case.

The horror story does not end there. A recent ongoing discussion has shed a lot of light on the profit killing rake in small stakes NLH games, but muffled are the screams of the souls crying out from LHE rake purgatory. They get hit the hardest, but quite frankly, since so few players play these games, nobody really gives a shit so they must carry on and suffer in silence.

The last, and perhaps worst, problem comes from the fact that since these games are the closest to being “solved”, the strategic champions of yesterday who failed to understand the nuances of game theory inevitably got pushed down into the lower limits. Now not only do you need to try and rip the stale money from the fish’s’ gills after it has been filtered through the dirty fingertips of the Mob, you also have to dodge the spears of the Spartans just to squeeze out your 000.1bb/100 winrate after rakeback. Good luck to you, fine sir!

Proof That Online Poker is Rigged!

Below is an old post from the Great Bill Rini but I have to smile every time that I think about it :)

One can hardly read any poker forum without running across individuals claiming that this or that site is rigged. Usually they are humiliated with the forum “experts” rudely telling them that the reason they’re losing is because they aren’t good poker players. I’m sad to say that I used to be one of those “experts.” I was one of the doubters until I actually caught one site cheating.

If you view the image below it looks like a normal hand being played (certain information has been dedacted to protect the innocent).

Normal Table

It looks normal unless you really examine the photo. Using some highly classified vector digital imaging software from the CIA I picked up on eBay for $50, I caught the dealer dealing off the bottom of the deck. I was as shocked as anyone but it all made sense once I thought about it. Notice in the picture above how they put that little box in front of the players sitting to the right and left of the dealer so as to obstruct their view. Players sitting that close would normally catch a dishonest dealer but “conveniently” the software blocks their view. Coincidence? Hardly!

Dealing from the bottom of the deck!

But that wasn’t the only cheating I caught. Notice the player to the right of the dealer in Seat 1. Notice anything out of place? Neither did I at first. But again, I used my imaging software to get a close up and guess what I see?

Cards up the sleeve

He’s got a card hidden up his sleeve! I guess it should have been obvious after his fourth pocket aces in a row.

Conclusion:  Online Poker is Rigged!

So now I have proof that online poker is rigged and if anybody tries to tell you differently, they’re in on it! If you feel you’ve been cheated then you may want to check out a tool developed by Bill’s Poker Blog called the RT Hand History Analyzer for Rigged Poker Games. It can tell you if there are any statistical abnormalities with any of the hands you feed it. Really a great tool to help you gather evidence about online poker being rigged.

Score a Point For the Paranoid: Protecting Yourself From NSA Snooping

Even a broken watch is right twice a day as was confirmed in last week's not-so-surprising reveal that major internet companies have been compliant with providing the NSA access to our private emails, file transfers, photos, videos, and chats via a program called "PRISM".  Here is Slate's breakdown of how the average law-abiding citizen can dodge the All Seeing Eyes of government spooks:

If you have followed the startling revelations about the scope of the U.S. government’s surveillance efforts in recent days, you may have thought you were reading about the end of privacy. But even when faced with the most ubiquitous of modern surveillance, there are ways to keep your communications away from prying eyes.

On Thursday, the Washington Post and the Guardian revealed a top-secret National Security Agency program called PRISM, which reportedly involves mining private data from the servers of companies including Google, Microsoft, Facebook, AOL, and Yahoo. The tech giants have denied participating in the program—but according to a leaked set of NSA slides, PRISM involves the monitoring of emails, file transfers, photos, videos, chats, and even live surveillance of search terms. Separate disclosures have revealed that the NSA is scooping up millions of phone records from at least three major phone networks in the United States, using the data as part of program the White House says is aimed at finding terrorists.

Read full article on Slate.com

Bilderbergers "Unjustly" Prepare Terrorist Alert at Annual Conference

Do you really want this guy spewing apocalyptic Bible verses on your front lawn?

The annual Bilderberg Conference is said to be a gathering of the most powerful people on earth that includes various heads of state both foreign and domestic, influential media personalities and high profile CEOs from billion-dollar companies such as Google.  Since there is a lot of secrecy surrounding this event including the location of the hotel where it is held, I would say that there is a good reason to feel at least somewhat wary of the motives of this elite group. I've also read (though admittedly will never bother to confirm) that American heads of state are forbidden by law to meet with foreign heads of state in secret. To his credit, Alex Jones has gone to great lengths to uncover the locations of the conference and bring national media attention to this event, as well as spearheading an organized protest outside the hotel where the event is held with his trademark megaphone in hand, blaring an impressive diatribe denouncing the evils of the New World Order.

As can be expected, he keeps his readers informed of all things Bilderberger via his two websites. The annual meeting of the Bilderberg Club is the Prison Planet equivalent of Christmas season and brings with it all sorts of news and non-news in a constantly updating feed of orgiastic paranoia. This year is different, however, and bears some actual news that is worth noting. Apparently, the Bilderbergers have gone the extra mile of putting their high-level security team on terrorist alert. With their ever vigilant itchy twitter fingers in full tilt mode, the Jonesians are in an uproar concerning this new development and feel that it is unjustly applied.

But is it really? I can certainly understand the anger at being lumped into what the US government would consider to be the ultimate enemies of the state. In my opinion, this is a perfectly reasonable and necessary precaution. The second claim by the Jonesians is that this should not be done since no specific threat has been made, to which I say, "do the specifics really matter?" Even if Alex Jones is right about everything he says, the Bilderbergers have every reason to potentially fear for their lives. From what I understand, these protests have been peaceful in the past, but that doesn’t negate the fact that many in the ranks of the conspiracy crowd are strong supporters of gun rights and can boast of the most impressive mental illness to health ratio of any group on earth found outside the perimeter of a psychiatric hospital.

A not insignificant number within their ranks believe that the Bilderbergers are not only untrustworthy on the political level, but rather, that they are agents of the Antichrist. Even stranger, the fringe of the group even believe they are a race of shape shifting reptilians who have traveled all the way from planet Nibiru to enslave humankind from the 4^th dimension, well outside of humanity’s reach of retaliation. So I ask: are these really the sorts of people you want picketing outside your event? If you were to ask me, the idea of people gathering in protest outside of my home in the belief that I’m hell-bent on the destruction of modern society would be positively terrifying, especially coupled with the fact that Alex Jones followers believe that it is perfectly logical to tote deadly weapons in public as some sort of “peaceful” protest against those they believe are out to permanently strip away their right to bear arms. The fact that these people are acting within their Constitutional rights would give me no comfort. Given the daily mishmash of Bible quotes in response to every news “event” on the Prison Planet website, it isn’t hard to picture a bold psycho who dropped his meds on the car floor on the way to Conspirapalooza attempting to fulfill biblical prophecy which says that the Antichrist will die of a lethal head wound. Sniper rifle, anyone?

How about this g- nevermind, that's just fucking cool...